Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins (21 page)

“Yes...general?” I say. It’s a complete guess—and completely wrong.

“Colonel. I work for a living.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you have an explanation for yourself?”

“No, ma’am. I’m new to this. I’m sorry. If I knew I was causing problems, I swear I would have—”

She silences me with a gesture. “Dismissed,” she says to the men, who hesitate a moment before giving the colonel a pair of crisp, synchronized salutes. They turn in unison and march off.

Colonel Coffin sighs, shakes her head. “Girl, you make it bloody hard to work up a lather. Are you always this polite?”

“Not always,” I admit.

“Mm. And do you always glow like that?” she says. She pulls a pair of mirrored sunglasses from her pocket, snaps them open, slides them on. Like she wasn’t intimidating before. At least she’s not non-yelling at me anymore.

“Not always.”

“You’re with that new group, right? The Hero Squad?”

I suppress a cringe. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Awful young to be doing that sort of work.” There’s nothing judgmental behind the statement.

“You’re not the first to say that. But I—my friends and I—we have these powers, so we feel like we have a responsibility to use them to do something good in the world.”

It sounds wicked cheesy, but Coffin buys it. “If that means you’re going to be around for a while, you need to get a transponder so we don’t have this kind of mix-up again.”

“A transponder?”

“A device that broadcasts a signal that identifies you as a friendly to all civilian and military air control systems,” Coffin explains. “Concorde is in charge of dispensing them for flyers in the New England region.”

Concorde? Aw, nuts.

“Talk to him. He’ll walk you through the process and register your transponder with the DOD.”

“DOD?”

“Department of Defense. Transponders are entered into the military systems through them.”

“Ah. Um...is it safe for me to...?”

“I’ll alert air traffic that you’ll be taking off,” Coffin says, jerking her thumb at the control room behind her. She digs out of her pocket one of those small leather wallets for business cards. She hands me a card but her name’s not on it. No one’s name is on it, just a phone number with, no kidding, a 555 exchange, like in the movies.

“This is good for one week. Until you get your transponder, each time before you go airborne, call that number. After you get your transponder? Give this to Concorde,” she says, tapping the card.

“Out of curiosity,” I say, “what happens if I don’t get a transponder?”

“Burn the card. And consider yourself permanently grounded,” Colonel Coffin says. She turns to leave. “You seem like a nice kid,” she says over her shoulder. “I’d hate to have to order you shot down.”

“Shoot you down?” Sara says. “Was she serious?”

“As a heart attack,” I say.

“Harsh,” Stuart says.

“And you have to ask Concorde for a transponder so you can fly legally?” Matt says, uttering a brief stream of profanity and taking an angry slurp of his latté. “Yeah, that’ll happen.”

“Thank you, Captain Optimism,” I say, even though I worry he’s not wrong.

“What are you going to do if he says no?” Missy says.

“Failure is not an option,” I say brightly, and my façade succeeds in deflecting the conversation onto more, shall we say, down-to-earth topics: Halloween, Matt reminds us, is but a few days away...

“So we really need to figure out what we’re doing for costumes. Things have been so nuts lately we let it slide, but we’re getting into crunch time. On the plus side, now that we have a fifth,” he says, gesturing at me, “our possibilities have expanded considerably.”

“Let’s go as AC/DC,” Stuart proposes. “Missy would make an awesome Angus Young.”

“Yeah I would!”

“Yeah, but we went as the Ramones last year,” Sara says. “Doing a band two years in a row?”

“No, good point,” Matt says. “Hmmm. We have enough for all the Marx Brothers, including the rela
tively unknown Gummo Marx, or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”

“I thought there were only four Turtles?” I say.

“The Turtles plus Splinter. Or, if we want an allTurtle theme, the female Turtle they introduced in the short-lived live-action series from the nineties, Venus DeMilo.”

How Matt knows some of this junk...
why
he knows this junk...

“Ooh! The Simpsons!” Missy says. “We have the right number of people, we have two boys and three girls...”

“I like the way Snrub thinks,” Stuart says, appropriately.

“All in favor?” I say in my official capacity as chairwoman, and the motion is met with a resounding group “Aye!”

Costume talk goes on until we break for dinner. Sara walks me home and says she’ll swing back in an hour so we can hike over to Missy’s house, which is hosting the nightly homework session for the first time. Well, for the first time since I joined the group. I’m told that Missy hosts rarely because of her father Dr. Ken Hamill, who, according to local legend, is a stern and humorless figure who can kill a buzz at fifty paces. Homework nights at the Hamill household tend to be dull affairs that, shock and horror, focus almost exclusively on homework. I’m perversely curious to meet the man, if for no other reason than to compare and contrast father and daughter.

“Mom, I’m home!” I call out. Here in the House of Hauser this normally mundane ritual has become a
formal check-in and, for my mom, cause for celebration. It means I’ve survived another day in a town she is certain is trying to kill me (oh, if only I could blow this off as baseless parental paranoia).

“Hey, honey, how was school?” she says from the kitchen, where something marvelous is cooking, as always. I live in fear of the day she decides she’s too tired to make anything after a hard day at work. Tonight is not that night. She dusts some fish fillets with one of her many top-secret spice blends and drops them into a pan of olive oil. I inspect a pot on the back burner. It’s full of mixed vegetables, steaming to perfection.

“Looks like we have a very heart-smart menu this evening,” I say.

“I noticed my pants were getting a bit snug,” Mom says as though this is no big deal. Trust me: whenever a woman’s jeans start feeling tight, it’s a big deal.

“Really? I haven’t had any problems.” She gives me a sidelong glance that tells me I’d best not sass her anymore. I make no promises. “Wait, only two of us tonight? Where’s Granddad?”

“Bowling night.”

“Since when does Granddad bowl?”

“He hasn’t in ages,” Mom says, “but he decided to take it up again.”

“He’s been going out a lot lately.”

“I know what you’re thinking. He’s not trying to get away from us.”

“Really?”

“Maybe a little,” she says, but she’s smiling. “But in a good way. You know how withdrawn he got after
Mom died. It’s good he’s getting out again, seeing his friends.”

And that there is what you’d call the leitmotif of the Hauser-slash-Briggs family. We’ve all been going through periods of personal upheaval followed by periods of trying to find our “new normal,” and we’re all hitting our respective grooves. Granddad has been reconnecting with his old hobbies and friends, Mom has been getting together with co-workers—dinner party here, cocktails there—and I have the Hero Squad. I guess for me it’s more like I’ve found my new
ab
normal.

The only one who hasn’t readjusted is my dad. I talk to him a few times a week and when I ask him what’s going on, his answer always falls into one of three categories: work, stuff around the house, and “nothing much.” He never mentions anything that sounds remotely like a social life, not so much as a beer with buddies after work or a Friday night movie. He hasn’t found anything to fill his life now that Mom and I aren’t in it.

Crap. Now I’m all depressed.

“Speaking of friends,” Mom says, “where is homework night tonight?”

“Missy’s place.”

“You haven’t been there before, have you?”

“Nope.”

“Where does she live?”

“She lives right along, um...what’s the name of the main road out there? The road we’re off of?” I want to say Outhouse Lane but I know that’s not right.

“Brickhouse Lane.”

“Yeah. But farther down, like, heading toward
the highway.”

“Okay. You planning to walk?”

“Yeah, Sara’s coming by after dinner and we’re heading over together.”

“Okay, good. When do you expect to be done? Usual time?”

“Maybe I should just file weekly schedules,” I say. “That way we can skip over this whole thing where you try not to sound like you’re grilling me even though you totally are.”

Mom turns to face me, hands on her hips: stern Mom Pose Number One. “I have a right to know where you’re going to be, you know,” she says. “It’s part of my job description, keeping track of you.”

“Yeah, but that last time you wanted a detailed itinerary was—”

When she was worried sick about me; when I was hanging out with a very questionable class of teenagers. We were typical bored, apathetic adolescents who spent our leisure time annoying mall cops with our mere presence, but Mom knew we were one unlocked liquor cabinet away from serious trouble. I didn’t see that at the time. I only saw a nosy pain-in-the-butt mother. This time she’s not worrying that my friends will lead me astray, she’s worried—
terrified
that one day I’m going to be walking down the street, minding my own business, when some super-powered whackadoo drops out of the sky to splatter me all over the landscape (again, if only I could dismiss this as Much Ado About Nothing – Parental Edition).

“Nothing’s going to happen to me, Mom,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”

A half-dozen emotions flash across her face be
fore she settles on a thin smile.

“Call me when you’re on your way home,” she says.

“Hey Sara, hey Carrie,” Missy says through clenched teeth. “Come on in, my dad’s home, I’m so sorry.”

“I thought he was working late,” Sara whispers as we slip into Casa de Hamill, a house as clean and tidy inside as it is outside. If this were one of those fancy gated communities, this would be the impossibly perfect model home they’d show to potential buyers.

“He was supposed to but there was a power outage, so he came home,” Missy says.

“Melissa.” Missy cringes at hearing her full name. I peer over her head and see her parents in the next room, sitting at a fancy antique dining room table. Mother Hamill smiles at us. Father Hamill does not.

“Yeah?”

“Invite your friends to wait for you in the living room” Father Hamill says, “and come finish your dinner.”

“Coming. What he said,” Missy says to us. “Oh, don’t turn on the TV.”

“Seriously. Don’t turn it on,” Sara says as we take a seat on a couch that is, no kidding, sealed in transparent plastic. I thought only old ladies with a million cats did that.

We sit in near-total silence, near total except for the squeak of plastic beneath my butt and the clink of silverware against porcelain drifting in from the dining room. There’s no conversation whatsoever.

Eerie, isn’t it?
Sara says via telepathy. Our prac
ticing is paying off; she can turn our psychic telephone on and, more importantly, completely off easily.

I’ll say. It feels like a funeral home, minus the mirth and whimsy.

Sara snickers despite herself. I catch Father Hamill give her a look that is simultaneously neutral and disapproving. I’ve never met a man who expressed himself entirely in subtext.

I pass the time examining from afar a half-dozen photos in identical silver frames positioned precisely atop a mantelpiece, like elite soldiers standing at attention. One is a wedding photo. One is a family photo taken quite some time ago (Missy appears tiny even by Missy standards). She’s in two other pictures. In one she’s hugging an Asian man who is not her dad (her uncle, I later learn), in the other she’s wearing a bright leotard and holding a trophy nearly as tall as her, a testament to her glory days as an aspiring young gymnast—a pursuit that’s been on indefinite hold since the family moved to Kingsport a few years ago (the schools here don’t offer much outside of the traditional team sports). In every single photo, Missy is sporting that big Muppety grin of hers. How such a small face can contain such a huge smile...

Ten minutes pass before Missy returns, her mouth drawn into a tight line. “Carrie,” she says with an air of formality, “these are my parents, Patricia and Kenneth.”

“Hello, Carrie, it’s nice to finally meet you,” Mrs. Hamill says, and the first thing that strikes me is how mismatched the Hamills are: she has a touch of middle-age plumpness, he’s skinny as a rail; she’s the tallest person in the room by a couple of inches, he’s almost as
short as Missy; she’s wearing a casual blouse and jeans, he’s in a suit the Secret Service would reject as too severe; she’s smiling, and I have sincere doubts Dr. Hamill has ever experienced a facial expression in his life—which is all the stranger considering that, now I see them side-by-side, I can see a lot of Dr. Hamill in Missy’s face, which is always bright and happy (in that respect, she definitely takes after her mother).

“It’s nice to meet you,” I say, shaking her hand.

“Hello, Carrie,” Dr. Hamill says. He does not offer his hand. “That would be short for...?”

“Caroline, but everyone calls me Carrie.”

“Mm.”

Translation: as far as he’s concerned, I’m Caroline.

“Would you girls like anything? Water, lemonade?” Mrs. Hamill offers.

“I’m good, thank you,” Sara says, enunciating carefully. She’s standing straighter, too.

“Same here, thanks,” I say.

“Well, if you change your mind, you just let us know, ‘kay?” Mrs. Hamill says. I catch the faintest note of a Southern drawl. Conversely, Dr. Hamill speaks without a hint of an accent or any undue inflection. He’s almost mechanical. If the academic field ever dries up for him, he could make a nice living recording announcements for public transit systems.

“I’ll be in my study,” he announces. “Unless there’s an emergency, I’d appreciate it if I wasn’t disturbed. I have quite a bit of work to complete for tomorrow.”